


the distant sound of dangerous ground

by kimaracretak



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Non-Linear Narrative, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-30 02:44:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10867395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: (uncovering wounds to heal her own fears / she learnt to grow alone): Cassandra de Rolo dies in the snow when her brother leaves her. Cassandra Briarwood dies when Delilah falls in the tunnels and Vecna screams behind a wall that still stands. Cassandra died, and died, and Cassandra … Cassandrais.Or; lives, deaths, and the improbability of ordering them all.





	the distant sound of dangerous ground

**Author's Note:**

> title from phildel, 'afraid of the dark', summary quote from diabulus in musica, 'crimson gale'
> 
> awkwardly on the line between fic and meta in a couple places oops

**i.** Cassandra de Rolo is an improbable survivor, a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter whose blood was promised to the Grey Hunt before she was born. In generations past she would have been coddled for fifteen years, brought out to greet Pelor's morning light each day of her summer before being set loose to meet his autumn hounds at the harvest. Instead she grows up thin and lonely, cursed by her family's newfound civility to _survive._

 

 **iii.** She survives the massacre in her castle’s halls for a week. She survives three arrows to the chest, resurrection and mortal recovery blurred into soft mossy-green days that eat slowly at her spirit like she always dreamed the forest would. She survives her first rebellion, because Delilah wants her – wants a daughter too pliant to complain of wandering hands, wants a prize too beautiful to be shown to anyone else, wants a sacrifice to prove a devotion too all-consuming to be named.

 

 **ii.**   _Sweet girl_ , the forest whispers to her as she lies delirious in the snow, soaked in her own burning feverish blood somewhere other than Sylas and Delilah's bed for once. _So I have fallen to the hunt after all_ , she thinks, and smiles long past the time she last draws breath. Cassandra knows that Whitestone is Pelor’s sun tree and Ioun’s fallen temple far more than it is a cluster of houses and some crypts. Cassandra dies when Whitestone passes to new hands, and wishes only she had time enough to know when she will live again.

 

 **vi.** It’s funny, really, how she’s only now free to want death, now that the worst things in her life are gone, now that her brother is safe and her town is free and her future expands before her once more. To die against or with the Briarwoods would never be an end. To die now would be to sleep, and she is so, so tired.

 

 **iv.**   _I am not a holy woman_ , she says to her brother’s foreign friends as the ghosts of her ancestors swarm around them, and the space in her heart and soul where the Raven Queen and Erathis once fought for her resurrection aches and _aches_. She is all empty now, a hollow shell that even the ghosts won't touch. They know Delilah waits for her ahead, and the Whispered One beyond that. She is not a holy woman but she will die for a god with Delilah's kiss on her mouth.

 

 **viii.** Cassandra spends too many of her days at the Raven Queen’s shrine even before it's complete, thinking about the moments of death that she’s passed through and the ones she’s been denied. About the undead she’s killed, the ones she’s almost summoned, the ones she’s almost loved. _Why am I still here, again?_ she thinks, over and over, but she is so very tired, and not quite brave enough to ask.

 

 **v.** Cassandra de Rolo dies in the snow when her brother leaves her. Cassandra Briarwood dies when Delilah falls in the tunnels and Vecna screams behind a wall that still stands. Cassandra died, and died, and Cassandra … Cassandra _is_.

 

 **ix.** _How do you do it?_ she asks Vax one day, his wing curled around her as their feet dangle above Zephra’s clouds. _How do you see death, and love it, and want it and still_ – she rests her head on his shoulder, feels the raven feathers in his braids tickle her cheek, and does not finish her sentence.

 

 **vii.** She dreams of death, still, ivory-masked death with a robe just like Delilah's and hands just as cold. Death is a woman, still, though she kisses Cassandra's forehead instead of her lips Cassandra still wakes in damp sheets with her hand between her legs, half-imagined echoes of the _crack_  of her neck snapping under Delilah's fingers still ringing in her ears. Death used to walk Whitestone Castle's halls along with its dead, and Cassandra does not know what to do with these new dreams.

 

 **x.** _Because she loves me too_ , Vax says, and it is answer enough.

 

 

( **xi.** The next time she goes to the Raven Queen’s shrine, she says, _I will prove you were right to let me stay_. She has little to offer, and she is not sure what she hopes to gain in return, but the time for silence in the shadows seems over. In the moonlight just barely visible through the cracks in the door, Cassandra is certain she sees the statue smile.)


End file.
